Automation Anywhere Reviews

Being a QA analyst, I am involved in testing my application's stability on a daily basis. A2019 helped me in automating the repetitive process that I have been doing every day.

Once I get familiarized with A2019, I am planning to discuss with my teammates how to implement it into our project for all of the new requirements.

Our primary use cases are smoke testing of the applications, sending email for reports, stability testing, API testing for REST services, database testing, and pulling data from Excel and using it in applications.

A2019 has significantly helped us in reducing the overall time that we have spent on our application manually. Going forward, we have also planned to implement the IQ Bot feature that we are still exploring.

Tasks or activities that were taking almost six hours a day have been reduced drastically to 30 minutes, which saves time as well as business costs.

Smoke testing of the application is performed.

Sending reports and sending emails is easy.

I have found the below items most valuable:

1. The ability to find objects easily through the 'Capture' option saves your time most significantly.
   
2. The ability to run only a particular step, instead of running it from scratch.
   
3. The ability to debug.
   
4. Given that A2019 is a web application, it saves space in a significant manner.
   
5. It is user-friendly and anyone can learn easily.
6. No coding knowledge needed.
7. The flow chart view of the steps is very easy to understand.
   
8. The free learning course provided helped me a lot. I was able to better understand and also practice on my own.

I would like to have on-call customer care support so that if the user gets stuck anywhere, he/she can get the issue clarified.

Additional details or support can be provided for IQ Bots.

The Help menu/description can be provided while hovering over actions so that it can help us better to know them.

The Variable feature can be improved, as there is no single place to handle all your variables.

Sometimes, while recording, the screen hangs and we are not able to perform any actions during that time.

Also, the support should be more user-friendly, as we are not getting any support online.

I have been using A2019 for more than five months.

This product is extremely stable.

Scalability is very good.

I was using Selenium but because it involved too much coding, I switched to A2019.

The initial setup is very easy.

I implemented it on my own.

The cost can be reduced a little for users.

I did not evaluate other options before switching to Automation Anywhere.

We are using AA to automate business use cases, which includes applications like SAP, ServiceNow, Outlook, etc.

We use Windows Server for the Bot Runner, Bot Developer, and Bot Creator. The Control Room is installed in an on-premises hosting. We have multiple clients here at HCL and we used AA for many clients and automated many use cases.

We provide AA setup for customers as well. We install, manage, and set up AA for customers to use, which makes it easy and can be expanded whenever they want. 

AA helped us to reduce the processing time of requests almost instantly.

One of the challenges we had was SAP Password Reset Requests, and we automated this process in AA and now the bot runs as soon as it receives an email in its inbox. AA extracts the data from email, logs into SAP, and then after resetting the password, sends the notification to the user. This all takes place within two minutes, maximum.

Another important use case involves user termination from the organization. The HR team raises a request to SNOW, and the bot receives the alert from SNOW. After checking if the termination date is met, the user is terminated from all the applications, and access is revoked by the bot.

I found that the REST API commands are very useful and easy to use. We use the REST API in multiple places, which saves a lot of time in terms of development as well as execution. We use the SNOW API and the TOPdesk API to create and update tickets in these apps.

Another great feature is MetaBot; when we automate web applications (mostly), after some time, the design or UI gets updated and we only have to recalibrate the bot. The bot accepts the changes and it starts to work again, which saves a lot of time for the developer and the business.

I would like to use VB.NET native code inside of Automation Anywhere. If there were a feature like InvokeCode in UiPath, it will help me to write native VB.NET code inside of AA. This would be a relief to the developers. 

Another feature I want to see is data conversion from one format to another. For example, I want to convert a string date time to Date Time format, or a float to an integer, etc. This will give me the flexibility to interact with other applications and help with passing correct values. I won't have to worry about the error handling from the application that I am automating.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past year and a half.

I am using both AA and UiPath, and I see both of them at par. Each tool has some advantages over the other.

The setup and licensing cost is affordable, and it is not exaggerated like UiPath.

We evaluated Blue Prism, NICE, WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere. We ranked AA first pace.

I think AA is a great tool and I love working with it.

We have a long list of customers and multiple use cases in pharma, account & finance, customer billing & payment, and other domains. We use AA to automate those tasks that need less or no human interaction. The reconciliation tasks, SAP and Excel operations, are automated using AA, take less time, and give accurate results. 

Working with MetaBot provided simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel and other application make tasks easier for developers.

Customers are happy with overall performance of bots and it makes the developer's life easy.  

We have a lot of clients who use AA bots in their own process. Tasks that are automated require less human input. AA bots save a lot of time, increase efficiency, deliver accurate output, and provide consistency which improves the overall function of processes in different domains.   

AA is an amazing tool that provides great features to perform Excel operations, Data Integration, and manipulation saving thousands of hours. It is an easy to use application that makes the developer's life comfortable. It doesn't require a technical background.

MetaBot is one of the most valuable features of AA. The simple drag and drop functionality, integration of DLL of SAP, Outlook, Excel, and other application make tasks easier for developers. There's nothing like MetaBot in other tools. 

One can also check the Bot farm for readymade Bots provided by other AA developers and experts.

A2019 is another great feature introduced by AA. The web-based Bot development, Control room, and Bot Insights are other nice features. Improved Error Handling and support of Python script in A2019 seems good.

I have identified a few areas where one can find the scope of improvement:

1. AA IQ Bot has not yet succeeded in living up to its reputation due to its high cost, low ROI, and its inability to meet client requirements.

2. Commands such as OCR are not up to the mark the output accuracy is not satisfactory.

3. It is unable to identify IF/Else, for Loop block when reviewing/writing AA code. There should be an expand/collapse button to identify a block of code.

Integration with Google Spreadsheets and other products should be included in the next release.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

It is a great and advanced tool for the development of Bots.

In terms of scalability, AA is one of the best available tools in the market and provides a lot of command and tools that do not require any technical specialty.  

Easy to use, advanced features like MetaBot, Improved Error Handling, Web-based bot development in A2019, support of Python script and many more.

I have had a great experience with the technical team. I got stuck in one scenario where Object Cloning was not working in the production environment. After spending many hours, I connected with the AA technical team and they provided a prompt solution.

I did not use any other solution.

ROI depends on time, cost, output accuracy, and effective and consistent results.

The pricing of AA is quite high as compared to other tools as it's one of the best RPA tools available in the market.

I did not evaluate other options.

Just reduce AA licensing prices and provide real scenario-based training modules in learning sections.

We use this product to automate business processes with higher accuracy, efficiency, scalability, and robustness. The projects include applications like SAP, SAP BOBJ, SAP BI, and a few legacy enterprise applications like Oracle EBS, and Oracle BI Discoverer.

These applications can be easily automated using Automation Anywhere, and integration with Outlook or Gmail for email, so that automatic responses can be set, is something else that can be easily included.

In a few of our environments like HR and finance, where the process runs with higher priority, Automation Anywhere works perfectly.

In our organization, areas like the human resources department and revenue department are completely being replaced by robots. The bots are saving a massive amount of human time and also reducing the intervention.

The process we have called Job Posting involves scraping data from two websites and posting the job in another's portal. This normally takes three people almost 50-60 hours per week, whereas the bot can easily do it in two hours. This is one of the important use cases that we have implemented.

The tool is designed to be easy enough for a new user to automate tasks.

The first and foremost feature is the availability of activities. These include activities for the keyboard, mouse, different types of loops, conditional, clipboard, and many more.

The overall UI of the tool is so user-friendly that even a beginner can use it easily.

The predefined recording facility is helpful and it mainly includes three types, being smart, screen, and web.

Automation can be more complex when the use case is to scrape text from a non-digital image, although thanks to Automation Anywhere's image recognition and OCR facility, the job can be completed easily.

One of the important drawbacks of Automation Anywhere is that it needs to be able to show the automated process as a single flowchart. After complete deployment of the bot, such as a Task Bot, to see an overview of the complete process and the steps in the job is difficult. As such, I would like to suggest that they provide an option to show the entire process as a flowchart. This isn't required for the UI pane, but perhaps simply export it as a flowchart. This would be great.

The ability to automate using third-party code involvement should be improved. As far as I know, Python scripts can be used to automate a few use cases but it would be great if there is a change to include the .NET and C# languages. I've also worked on UiPath and .NET code can be used for most of the Excel automation. This includes operations like creating pivot tables and applying advanced filters. These are things that work directly with VB.NET code. 

Automation anywhere needs a forum where active users can provide answers for standard errors and exceptions. More webinars regarding the latest releases and the features should also be created.

Automation Anywhere has been used for less than one year in our organization. 

I would say the stability of the solution depends on how well the developer understands the process. When it comes to the product's stability, Automation Anywhere is doing a great job in maintaining timely releases.

I would say this product is very scalable and the ability to have Metabots and Task Bots makes it even more so.

Automation Anywhere has a great technical support team. We had a situation where the bot needed to deal with difficult tasks and the entire team got stuck. At this point, we had the idea of asking technical support for help, and the response time was very good.

I came from a UiPath background and I haven't completely moved to Automation Anywhere. I still work on both of these tools. Based on the use cases and the client's requirements, the appropriate tool will be chosen.

To speak in particular about Automation Anywhere, I've heard a few of our clients saying that Automation Anywhere has much more ability, such as the usage of Metabots, and Task Bots, which can be used repeatedly in different use cases. To me, this is a very interesting feature.

The initial setup was a bit hectic, but later on the with the help of the wonderful support team, it went smoothly.

I would rate the vendor team an eight out of ten.

So far, the organization has 20+ bots, which has generated more than $50K of ROI. As a developer, I am not familiar with all of the numbers.

Pricing is a bit high when compared to other available tools; however, the tool is worth the cost.

When it comes to automation, the common question will be to compare the tool with other available tools and as per my knowledge, the first comparison happens with UiPath. Although UiPath has its own advantages, when it is balanced with the most popular capabilities like scalability, security, and maintenance, Automation Anywhere wins.

I would like to suggest the vendor have a well-maintained community forum, where the notice board should be available to notify of upcoming releases. I would also like to see more webinars conducted to help make the tool more popular

It is good to see more improvements in the tool and the effort of the team to implement all of the latest features is highly appreciated.

My primary use case is automating the reports from SAP for various domains like accounts, billing, shipment, etc. AA is consolidating the reports for these various domains across different employee numbers and order numbers, then sending them to different business owners using the SMTP server. This reduces human intervention and effort.

This automation helped the functional people to focus on other tasks instead of looking into these, and this saved around 50% of the total effort of the day.

Since business users receiving reports on time and with accuracy, this helped us in achieving better customer satisfaction

AA has vastly improved my organization in gathering more business, reducing human efforts, and optimizing client business. It does this by automating the business processes in almost the domains of SAP, which results in better client satisfaction.

With the help of Automation Anywhere, we have provided more automation ideas from our side, which helps the client in building trust with us and providing more business opportunities to grow.

We started with a team size of five and within the short span of three years, we have increased our team members to 25, handling different business domains.

We use the IQ Bot and Metabots extensively in almost all of our tasks. We have created the bots to consolidate reports from various resources like webpages, databases, and different message formates like PDFs, Excel, XML, and submitting them to the business owner.

Scheduling helps to generate and send reports without any delay.

We have used this functionality to automate business processes that submit the order forms in SAP for a large number of orders without any human intervention.

Automation Anywhere should think about the integration with Machine learning and deep learning with ease, so that AA can be used in various other domains that require human calculation and logic to work. A good application would be IVR, as this can help businesses reduce the response time and achieve better customer satisfaction

AA should include more features in the mobile app, such as monitoring and debugging bots. This can help the administrator to look at the status on the fly.

They should provide more features to improve the visibility of bots.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last three years.

I would rate the customer service a ten out of ten, as they provided excellent support, and in a short timeframe. This helped to resolve all of our issues quickly and as efficiently as possible.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to Automation Anywhere.

We have implemented in-house.

Before choosing AA, we evaluated IBM, Blue Prism, and UiPath.

We normally use automation to interact with SAP applications. Our platform is entirely built on SAP. We are mainly a manufacturing company. We interact with SAP and do a lot of things, like invoicing, entering the value in SAP, and so on and so forth.

The ease of access and deployment are the most valuable features. With SAP, moving from production test to production is very difficult, it takes too long and too much testing. If there's an error or any change in the system, you will have to go through a huge process which takes around one to two months. However, in Automation Anywhere, if you want to do a small or a medium-level change, you can ask the developer to work on it. E.g., one or two weeks is hardly enough for us to develop and deploy it again. So, it sources and is much faster. I believe the security is a very important matter in terms of our company, so that is also an aspect where Automation Anywhere shines.

From an SAP point of view, we have in-built features. They have integrated everything together, so it's much easier for us to use that.

We have in-house, a few variables, which we use from technical perspectives. We don't have them in Automation Anywhere, but they introduced them yesterday. I had a word with an Executive Officer, and he told me that they took all this into consideration and developed it. 

It depends on how you develop it predominantly. Because it's not judged just by saying that it's not stable or anything like that, it's how you develop a framework and how you do it. That's how. From my experience, we have a good number of developers. On my team's, we have around five to six members who are working on this process. We have created a framework in such a way that we don't miss anything. For the past one to one and a half years, we haven't had any post-production issues. The amount of human errors that have occurred have been reduced to around 15 to 20 per person.

It's a scalable product and process. We've been using it for a long time. There are few products in the market, out of which we chose Automation Anywhere because it suits our company very well. We have a scope of expanding the process and bring new teams in to be involved in this as well.

We have 24/7 support. We usually talk to the representative and get a lot of information. We share our knowledge. 

One of the most important things, which I found interesting at this conference, is even high-level executive people come to us and they ask for feedback, e.g., the drawbacks faced while using this product? They're getting in all the knowledge and feedback, then they're implementing it. The most important thing is they're implementing what, as a developer, we wanted include to make our lives easier and for the business to be satisfied.

The initial setup was straightforward. The new version of A2019, which they have introduced, is much easier than what we are doing now. It's all cloud-based and very easy to install. The whole experience is better.

I have experience working with UiPath as well. The one thing is the customer involvement and experience is much better with Automation Anywhere. The feedback which we give and the response time from the Automation team is much quicker. We had some negative feedback and some suggestions to Automation Anywhere team, which they took into consideration. It's like a people's software, where they listen to developers and improve on it. That's the reason why my organization and I are using Automation Anywhere.

I'll say that it is perfect; 10 out of 10. Because we had some drawbacks in Automation Anywhere, which they fixed and developed, taking into consideration the feedback from a huge community of developers. To consider every piece of feedback and work on that, it's a really tedious task. They worked on that and proved that they can do it again.

I actively participate in doing all the data analysis and robotics things in the company.

I work for a Genpact. Its a Genpact India, which is privately maintained. It's a US-based company. We work for a different type of a client. It's not only about healthcare. We work for a financial domain and financial development domain. We deal with different types of analysis, where we apply all types of robotic automation processes along with machine learning algorithms, if required. It all depends upon the client and what they require to done on their behalf.

This solution is all about robotic process automation (RPA), which we deal with. We know that in real life, we have hectic work day-to-day and the volume is increases. Doing manual intervention leads to error. That's why everywhere it feels like we are implementing robotic process automation. In a traditional way, we used to use that RPA console, but this tool helps us do RPA and saves us time, improving our quality. This is required at any level to get a better ROI.

It's all about the client requirement. About six months back, we received a request from a client who wanted us to automate their process. We gave different solutions to do it. They came up with a solution, and said "Okay I want you to go with RPA using this automation tool".

That is how Automation Anywhere came into the picture. It took almost two to three weeks to first learn because we were not aware of how it works. As a consulting company, you need to take a project first because that is the important part. If you miss the project, it will go to another company. So, we took the project and learned about how to involve all these things. We built a team who understood the process, what needed to be done, and what did not need to be done in this particular process, then we took this project.

Based on using this RPA tool, Automation Anywhere, we delivered successfully. The client was happy because they suggested it and gave us the idea. We didn't have to worry about how it would work. So, it was fine for us.

When you look at the volume to process, it takes time. You have a mindset that you may fall in error. If you want to reduce both those things, you need to come up with a solution that will give you both those things together: One is quality, which you are always looking at, and second, your costs. This also saves the cost because you need to hire 10 people to do VBA automation, that will take time. If you use tools which are already enabled with Automation Anywhere, you can enable and use them wherever you want. I feel good comfortable with this particular tool.

I suggest that they add some features in dashboard, where you can say, "These type of features are things that people like more." You want to add those to your project and showcase them to the client so they will be happier. Because you know what features people like if you give a suggestion, that is good for everyone.

I could not say it's a stable product, because when you move in the market, there are many companies are there. They are coming with the different features about your machine learning algorithm, and we should have something predefined.

We already have in Automation Anywhere something that is giving me suggestions. The moment someone is capturing data or reading data, you might suggest, "Okay, you want to do these things." It means that you are giving a suggestion based on the prior historical data that you have collected from different clients. If that is getting enabled, then it would be good because I would not have to worry about what features I would need to add. We know that the client might be looking for these types of features.

I feel day by day there will be an implementation coming up and we will be adding new features. I will look forward to using their services for this.

A tedious task, they have reduced it to a normal task. So, I feel comfortable because Automation Anywhere (the company) is working toward minimizing our efforts, and we are happy with that.

If the process was totally VBA-driven, e.g., sending a mail to a client and attaching so many document to emails, that's very tedious stuff. Something might happen if you do it by VBA automation. E.g., if you're Excel is not responding or what will happen if your system will get hung. The Automation Anywhere tool is in cloud so we don't worry about that. It's all about Internet speeds and servers that are stalling out. I feel that it save us time and provides ROI as a monetary benefit because it reduces FTE, the number of headcount working for a particular project.

I was just aware of this particular tool apart from using a VBA tool for normal automations, I am happy with this tool. I will not be going with another tool. There is always a market open so people can go and switch. However, I feel this is a good tool for day by day. Everything coming over is new, which is very good.

I feel giving them an eight to nine (out of 10). There should be always improvement for any product which comes out the market because there is also a competitor inline with them.

We use this solution for automating tasks such as:

• Manual journal entries on monthly closing
• Travel and expense claims processing
• Net sales monthly closing checks
• Logistics master data maintenance for every new shipment
• Vendor creation on master data for every new demand
• Order confirmation reminders automated for vendors 

We are just using it as one of the automation technologies. The major automation has already happened over SAP on the backend since the whole company globally runs on a single ERP. However, where conventional methods or basic solutions don't work, it definitely helps to use AA software.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the SMART Recorder.

The overall developer client has an easy-to-use UI.

The Control Room, scheduling features, and client repository are really good features that make day-to-day bot development and enhancement quite quick and easy.

The PDF Integration feature is also quite helpful, as well as the Send email command that helps us skip a lot of Outlook-based steps that are not necessary.

More support required to be embedded in the SMART Recorder for SAP objects.

IQ Bot should be available embedded as a feature on the developer client and not as a separate product.

Some NLP AI is required to work in combination with RPA, especially for reading unstructured emails. 

This solution is quite stable. We get one or two tickets in the whole year due to any downtime and that is never due to AA.

AA is the easiest and the best when it comes to scalability.

Technical support for this solution is the quickest and the best. I always get a response within the same day and their support matches our SLAs.

It was a little complex due to the IIS Manager and a lot of other features but with version 11 and beyond it is much easier to install and configure.

We performed the implementation in-house.

While calculating the setup cost you should account for the server, virtual machines, product licenses, maintenance costs, and running costs.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated UiPath and Blue Prism.

Be careful with the installation of this solution. It is better to do it with support from the vendor at first.